Google Page Experience - a New Ranking Factor
Hi Everyone,
Google has announced that it's doubling down on user experience, but not to the exclusion of quality content.
The new Page Experience ranking factor will not be released until next year, but it focuses on penalising pages that:
- Load slowly
- Jump around as they load (usually caused by images or embeds loading after the text)
- Contain intrusive interstitials (those ads that pop up between you clicking the link and actually seeing the page)
- Are running on HTTP
- Have lots of intrusive ads
It will also factor in Google's new Core Web Vitals factors that have been released in the last couple of weeks. In addition to the factors above this includes safe browsing criteria (no malware).
Google has stressed that quality content will still be a more important element, but where there are two pages that both have quality content, the one that delivers the better user experience will be ranked higher.
They've also finally conceded that AMP will no longer be a requirement for pages to figure in the mobile version of the top stories section. (About time too, in my view!).
This means that we need to be thoughtful about the theme we choose. Providing a clean, quick user-experience is going to be more important than having sliders, auto start videos, huge hero images and lots of ads.
Here are the gory details:
https://searchengineland.com/the-google-page-experience-upda...
Cheers,
Martin.
Recent Comments
2
Hi Martin,
Thanks for sharing. I noticed yesterday when I checked my site speed it mentioned core web vitals. My speeds were good but it said my site does not pass the core web vitals. I’m not even sure what that means.
Core Web Vitals has already had an impact on my site, my bounce rate has gone from averaging in the single figures to 100% for all organic views and that is about 60% of total traffic
Thanks Martin for sharing this information to us.
Take care
Charlotte